The transfer of copyright protected digital content in a non-broadcast arena is generally known. Presently, content providers are the only source for content previews, which may usually be transferred freely. Content preview recipients may obtain complete access to the corresponding content and corresponding right from a content server or some other source typically only upon payment of a content license fee. Other content usage control architectures that have been proposed to allow content usage rights to be expressed in vouchers which may be created and distributed separately from the content itself when the content is registered by or with a voucher server. Payment for issued vouchers is collected by a payment collection entity, such as a cellular communication network operator. Registered content previews may be transferred freely among terminals and peer to peer communications and viewed without a voucher, but the content may be fully accessed only upon purchasing a voucher from the payment collection entity.
Consumers are increasingly utilizing non-voice entertainment services through cellular phones and other mobile terminals. Such mobile terminals may include any suitable mobile device that may, for example, communicate wirelessly with suitable networks such as the Internet, intranets, cellular systems, terrestrial digital video broadcast system (DVB-T) or satellite broadcast systems. For example, cell phones have been proposed that include built in digital broadcast content receivers such as DVB-T receivers, cellular transceivers that receive for example GSM-signals, CDMA-signals, or any other signals to facilitate both wideband data stream reception, such as through the DVB-T receiver and lower band reception and communication through the cellular transceiver. These mobile terminals can receive and display (such as play) video and audio streams, digital books, support e-commerce transactions and receive digital television broadcasts.
Such mobile multimedia terminals may include: controllers that switch to the particular receiver according to a communication environment, a display interface to optimize received over the air data signals for display, media decoders to decode received over the air data signals, employ synchronization managers connected to the controller and receivers that enable reception of over the air data signals without re-synchronizing a receiver. Known multimedia mobile terminals may employ memory to store the received digital broadcast content. Such mobile multimedia terminals attempt to manipulate the data signals for display and may combine the broadcast data signal with other data to create a display. However, such mobile multimedia terminals, although apparently allowing the storage of broadcast digital data, do not appear to provide user capability of selecting portions of a digital broadcast to create clips nor recording such clips for sharing content among peer devices without violating copyright protection or other digital rights management limitations. In addition, it does not appear that such terminals facilitate billing for recorded clips or for their distribution. In addition, such mobile multimedia terminals do not appear to allow editing of the digital broadcast content to provide, for example, edited clips that may be shared with other mobile terminals.
In addition, such mobile multimedia terminals typically require the use of a built in digital data broadcast receiver to directly receive the wideband broadcast data stream. It may be desirable to allow cellular phones and other mobile terminals that do not have the built in digital data broadcast receiver, to nonetheless be able to edit digital broadcast content.
In addition, it has been proposed to have mobile terminals that communicate recorded digital information to peer devices while maintaining copyright protection to allow for example a peer device to act as a content provider. However, such devices have not been proposed to include the ability to edit recorded clips of digital content to allow, for example, customized clips to be communicated among peer devices.
In addition, conventional digital rights management techniques typically addresses whether content can be copied but do not typically address whether copied content can also be edited. For example, digital rights that are controlled by a broadcast service provider typically do not control whether a user device may add overlay information, title information, comments, highlighting, splicing, reordering, speed altering and transforming the digital broadcast content (such as adding effects, rotating, filtering, sizing, cropping or other information transformations).
The various aspects, features and advantages of the present invention will become more fully apparent to those having ordinary skill in the art upon careful consideration of the following detailed description of the invention with the accompanying drawings described below.